Archives for October 2006

That’s the currnet blog spam roundup. The typical phentermine spam, casino/poker spam, viagra spam, and Halloween costume spam, plus lots of “Nice Site” spam, one comment spam from an SEO firm in Colorado, and of course Jill got caught by Akismet (again). But this time I see a blog comment spam from UNICEF.org. Is UNICEF really blog spamming their message these days? I hope not. That’s one quick way to tarnish a brand, no?

Whether tragic events touch your family personally or are brought into your home via newspapers and television, you can help children cope with the anxiety that violence, death, and disasters can cause.

Listening and talking to children about their concerns can reassure them that they will be safe. Start by encouraging them to discuss how they have been affected by what is happening around them. Even young children may have specific questions about tragedies. Children react to stress at their own developmental level.

The Caring for Every Child’s Mental Health Campaign offers these pointers for parents and other caregivers:

* Encourage children to ask questions. Listen to what they say. Provide comfort and assurance that address their specific fears. It’s okay to admit you can’t answer all of their questions.
* Talk on their level. Communicate with your children in a way they can understand. Don’t get too technical or complicated.
* Find out what frightens them. Encourage your children to talk about fears they may have. They may worry that someone will harm them at school or that someone will try to hurt you.
* Focus on the positive. Reinforce the fact that most people are kind and caring. Remind your child of the heroic actions taken by ordinary people to help victims of tragedy.
* Pay attention. Your children’s play and drawings may give you a glimpse into their questions or concerns. Ask them to tell you what is going on in the game or the picture. It’s an opportunity to clarify any misconceptions, answer questions, and give reassurance.
* Develop a plan. Establish a family emergency plan for the future, such as a meeting place where everyone should gather if something unexpected happens in your family or neighborhood. It can help you and your children feel safer.

If you are concerned about your child’s reaction to stress or trauma, call your physician or a community mental health center.

I just flew Frontier Airlines. I hit the highway from Denver at 6am for my 8:30am flight, only to encounter snow plows and traffic jams in white-out conditions. The cell still worked, so I called Frontier Airlines to check on flight status. No delays. Darn. It didn’t make sense to me, but a second call an hour later was the same: no delays. I arrived at the full parking garage at 8:13 am, parked in the snow on the roof, and joined the very long line at check in. Of course I couldn’t use the self check in, because I had missed my flight and needed to re-book. Or did I?

The flight was delayed almost 2 hours. It didn’t leave until after 10am. But I didn’t know that until I discovered it later while waiting for my 2pm flight. It seems Frontier Airlines maintains it’s original check in time even if the flight is delayed. When I checked in, the clerk could have easily sent me to my flight but instead told me I had no option but standby for the 12:50 flight. I state it again: no option but standby.

I later learned that standby is a dynamic process as well. You can’t get a seat assignment until 30 minutes before departure, and prior to that Frontier Airlines can sell the available seats, or give them away to “partner airlines” such as United Airlines, essentially bumping you to the next flight. If that happens you’re on standby again. Frontier Airlines also gives you a chance to buy a standby seat assignment for a $25 fee, but the 200-person-long customer service line is the means to that security. I wonder why the clerk didn’t tell me that when I was re-booked..? I was a Frontier Airlines customer arriving late due to traffic conditions on a blizzard morning when even my own flight was delayed almost 2 hours, but I was treated like an “extra” that “might” be accommodated after everyone else including United Airlines customers.

Anyway when my 12:50 flight was also delayed, I saw plenty of airlines were flying on time and I wanted to buy a new ticket from someone who would actually fly me to Seattle. I pressed the Frontier Airlines clerk to learn all of these details, and she gave me a seat assignment instead of standby (without any fee). My flight eventually left at 2 something. Just prior to departure, I watched as the previously available standby seats were consumed by a combination of factors, including a group of fly-through passengers arriving on my plane but staying to fly through to Seattle with the rest of us. Oops. Another 5 or so seats trimmed from the standby list to accommodate them. I suppose it worked out because there was at least 1 empty seat on the flight (next to me… last row in the back, middle seat, no reclining, back against the lavatory sink wall).

I will never fly Frontier Airlines again. I don’t recommend Frontier Airlines. Fronteir Airlines, as a brand, is tarnished. United Airlines is looking better than Fronteir Airlines, if only for the fact that even Frontier Airlines treats United Airlines customers better than they treat Frontier Airlines customers. Go figure.

As I watched the Direct-TV during the flight, there was a show about Big Luxury Brands. It was all about Gucci and Dolce-Gabanna and other big, expensive brands that sell products at exorbitant prices and suffer world-wide counterfeiting. The producers collected some good counterfeit products, and interviewed people on the street, challenging them to tell a real item from a fake item. Louis Vuitton bags, Tiffany bracelets, Coach wallets. Every clip showed the consumer choosing the fake item as the “real one”. In a classically disappointing segment finale, the commentator added “why are the big branded items so expensive? Because of quality assurance and for your safety”. That’s not a quote, but it’s close.

So Gucci sunglasses cost $400 because they are better quality and safer than $10 sunglasses? I’m not sure I follow that logic, but the point is that big brands have a TON of work to do maintaining those very very high prices (and profits). Is it worth it? As long as it works.

Brand maintenance is a silent partner in the Big Luxury Brand business. It takes a percentage. A percentage of the profits goes to building and maintaining the brand. Better brand = bigger profits. The limiter is consumer acceptance. And that, of course, can be bought via advertising and marketing, up to an upper limit of sales volume — you need to have enough millionaires to buy your $10,000 jeans, right?

I think there can’t be a partial commitment to branding. For the Super Premium brands, branding is almost an all-or-nothing endeavor. The more you spend making and protecting that brand, the more you can charge. The Chinese manufacture sunglasses just-like-the-Gucci-ones for a dollar or so each, in quantity. Gucci sells theirs for upwards of $200. Consumers apparently can’t tell the difference, even when challenged to do so with careful inspection. So you buy a few dozen pair (for $24 total) and hand pick the highest quality one as your “Quality Assurance”. No doubt Gucci spends a considerable portion of their profits keeping those Chinese copies out of circulation.

So how do you protect your brand? Frontier Airlines had quite a mess on their hands in Denver Thursday morning. They had to de-ice the planes, wait for the airport maintenance crews to clear snow, and accommodate thousands(?) of inconvenienced travelers. I gave them a solid 8 hours of “branding opportunity” as a captive audience, watching Mother Nature make a mess of the travel process. Frontier Airlines did an excellent job of destroying their brand in my eyes. How much opportunity do you have to project your brand on line? Do you take advantage of every opportunity?

Frontier Airlines chooses to accommodate United Airlines passengers over Frontier Airline’s own standby passengers. Was that a cost decision? What percentage of profits does Frontier Airlines dedicate to preserving their brand? Tarnishing their brand? They should have admitted to the delays they were experiencing, at the very least. Then perhaps I could still trust them. What about you? Do the post-purchase emails sent by your shopping cart engender trust, or create concern and second doubts? (Dear , thank you for your oder…).

When I search for your brand, do I find a positive branding message at the top of Google, or a page about some Internet geek all pissed off about how he was treated by customer service during a snow storm in Denver? Not sure? Check for yourself. You may decide it’s high time to put a wee bit more of those profits into brand protection by hiring an SEO consultant.

It’s not that late (almost 2am) but as I am feeling a bit tired today I’ve poured a glass of wine and set back from the monitors to write this post. I just read yet-another-non-seo complaining about SEO as a field of scam artists. Yawn. It was a copy writer, no less. And one who works in SEO, no less. Yawn.

If there was any truth to the claims that SEOs don’t really perform and are just a bunch of sales people pushing mystical snake oil, why do we have so much work? I didn’t say contracts, but actual work. Well, let me try and answer that. I will pull from my daily experiences (today, even) and from the items currently scattered around my desk – active client projects.

Let’s start with the copy that I wrote today. Most of it was not written by copy writers. However, some of it was. And some of it was written by former NY Times editors, current English professors, and an author. All of it needed to be re-written. Am I a brilliant author, credentialed editor, or artful copy writer? Sure I am. And I am an SEO. And I had to re-write every one of these things to make them sensible to the web audiences they were intended to serve.

Think that’s just my ego talking? Think again. Upon review of my editing, everyone agreed it was better, and they don’t even know how to evaluate the copy for it’s SEO utility. Still think SEOs are scam artists? Next time, instead of waiting 3 weeks and paying 4 figures for copy, check with your SEO to see if you really need it to be that way. It’s not magic or mysticism… it’s not-common-enough sense. The content has to navigate the keyword universe such that it places the message in context, supports the sales or conversion goals of the web PAGE, and satisfies the search engine’s requirements for relevance. I’m an SEO, and that is my job.

Now lets move to the web design work I did today. I love designers. They know how to create what they see in their visual imaginations. I have a great visual imagination – I know exactly what I want. But I can’t create it. They can and do create and I marvel at their skills. And then they go and start turning those comps into HTML markup and I want them to simply GO AWAY. Designers should design, ok? Not code, and not convert their visuals into markup. Leave that to the coders (and me), because otherwise, like I did today, I will have to redo it all.

And the page design work? What is this sub title for? And this one? It looks like a breadcrumb, but not exactly. It’s light gray. It’s a generic word. WHY IS THIS HERE? No one knows. Three months of committee work to get approvals on the web pages, WHICH HAVE ALREADY BEEN CONVERTED TO MARKUP, and yet not one person can tell me why these meaningless, generic, non-nyperlinked, barely-visible subtitles are on every page. I am willing to bet that someone, who goes unidentified, put that in there “for SEO” and is now unwilling to admit it. Well, funny thing is, if you have already approved the presence of that extra line of text, and no body knows why it is there, I can change it to whatever I want, right? Maybe put some relevant keyword-rich hierarchical references there, or (gasp!) actual breadcrumbs? H2 hasn’t even been used yet. If only I had enough keywords…

Which brings me to the keyword research I had to do today. Magic? No, I just used Word Tracker and Overture plus a few trips back and forth to the search engines and traffic logs, as any monkey could have done. And of course as I worked I framed everything using my a-priori knowledge of this market’s keyword space (since I have considerable experience and yes, expertise in this market) so that every judgement I exerted upon these projects was sound. That’s my job. I’m the SEO.

Oh, did I mention those traffic logs weren’t actually available? Yeah, and that’s why I was doing sysadmin work today, too. You see, CRON jobs only run if the cron table entries are properly formatted. Otherwise, the entries will just sit there yet the jobs won’t actually be run. And your logs won’t actually rotate. And your current log will only reflect a few days or data, JUST LIKE IT DID THE LAST TIME YOU PAID ME TO ASK TO SEE IT. All that historical data which was supposed to be there since the sysadmin was charged with configuring logrotate 3 MONTHS AGO, isn’t there today, either. But it will be tomorrow, because I micro managed the fix today. That, too was part of my job as SEO. Now watch me pull a rabbit out of this hat…nothing up my sleeve…PRESTO!

Where did that wine glass go? Okay, so enough about ME, how was your day?

In suburban America in the 80’s, everyone had a home bar, and everyone wanted to know everyone else’s drink. You wanted to be able to take a guest aside to the bar and serve him what he liked…make him feel special. The town hall people, the lawyer down the street, the cardiologist that gave out free advice, and of course the ice cream company district manager living next door. I was just a teenager but sometimes running to the Local Liquor Store for somebody’s favorite Tanguerey, or Jim Beam, or Canadian Club was *the* critical task of the day.

Nowadays SEO people meet at bars and restaurants, but they still drink, and that aside meeting is still where the SEO action takes place at major conferences. Oh, sure the sales action and intros largely take place on the conference floor and exhibit hall, but the SEO action is at the bar.

In this case the lawyer has been swapped out for a domain guru or semantics expert, the town hall guy has been replaced by the link meisters and directory kings, and the ice cream salesman? Well, let’s just say that these days he’s selling luncheon meat.

I’m always looking for ways to motivate myself to compete, because it is that competitive work done in an emotional, driven fury that pays off year after year as dividends (residual income). The daily grind brings in the bread, yes, but the bi-weekly checks from activity on sites built over a few frantic days of go,go,go! completed long ago… well that sugar is sweetest of all. If you’ve ever been to Brazil and eaten the bananas or mangos or pineapples, you will agree that some sugars are definitely sweeter than others.

So I have decided I will try and keep up with the spammers. I process upwards of 800 emails per day on most days. Of those, about 400 are actual information (the rest are automated reports, security status indicators, and the like). Of those 400, it seems that about 100 or so are spam. No, I don’t use a spam filter (I can’t afford to… the spam filters block too many of my automated reporting scripts).

So I will now set a goal of working “at least as hard as the spammers”. That means I have to generate at least 100 new items of information per day, to keep up. That’s probably going to be 10-20 pieces of unique content. Ten to twenty pieces of feedback, commentary, or announcements. Ten or so bits of meaningful internal communications to sustain my business, and about 50 thoughtful emails. That’s just an estimate.

Just to make sure I am not actually becoming like the spammers, I will exclude from the count all ThreadWatch activity, all simple “approval” or “consent” emails, all SEO forum activity, and any other non-work-related bits. That way no one should tell me that my stuff is just spam because I’m on a kick to meet a quota (no one who knows me, at least).

If you know me you know I don’t disclose my sources. My first job as an Engineer was with a small instrumentation manufacturer, and I learned that business intelligence (including vendor lists and employee directories) is very, very valuable. As a Biomedical Engineer working in New Jersey, word was “the parkway goes both ways” suggesting employees flipped back and forth between companies up and down the turnpike. Competition was good for innovation then, too.

Lately I have been asked many times about my sources for CSS layouts and stylesheets, especially ones that work with IE7. I use a compressor for my js and CSS, which strips comments and labels, and I simply won’t send any referrals to my CSS people. They are busy enough as it is. Sorry.

But I will suggest that if you look hard enough you will find plenty of quality CSS resources that are on the edge of practical efficiency (as opposed to the theoretical edge of CSS, which I can’t appreciate in my competitive work). A few resources I really enjoy are cssplay.co.uk for ideas (I liked it better before it got to 3.3 million page views per month, alas) and Layout Gala for box models.

I know I will regret sending competitive webmasters to these resources. Did you get a load of Stu Nicholls latest CSS-only gallery script? It’s simply beautiful. Another photographer working in CSS and it really shows. And if you have any SEO sense about you look at the code. Add a Flash top nav bar and it’s SEO heaven!

CSS is one area where I have a hard time arguing against outsourcing. Markus over at AUBlog posted his own experiences with two services that build valid CSS pages from your design comps. It doesn’t get any easier than that. He had good results from both PSD2HTML and XHTMLized, with each charging less than $150 for the first page, and more for optimized pages. The turn around time might be the most attractive feature though – 3 hours in some cases. Wow. Both provide portfolios of live sites so you can inspect code.

I don’t know how good it is, but Sitegrinder promises valid CSS pages direct from Photoshop. In 3 minutes. Before you write it off, take a look at the Pro version feature set. I know it sounds like a dream too good to be true, but if it’s as advanced as it sounds (no slices, pure CSS for box styling, etc) it could be a must have tool for kick-starting pages. If anybody knows better, post a comment!

I don’t consider myself a role model for SEO, and I don’t mean to give “advice” on SEO. Tips, yes, because they are logical, technical, and can be tested. But advice? The trick about understanding advice is, authority is granted, not taken. You only have “authority” if someone grants you that authority in their own mind. I may give advice based on my own experiences and perhaps knowledge and/or judgement, but that advice is received by YOU in light of the authority you grant me. Let’s see how you do.

My best advice on SEO for those looking to succeed in SEO is “pay attention to attention”. It’s all about attention. It’s almost about nothing but attention.

Do I have your attention? Is that good for you right now? Pay attention to where you place your attention.

Now pay careful attention to what I am about to say. I worked in medical rehabilitation and some of that work involved cognitive attention measurement, as well as the quantification of mental and physical fatigue. I spent a good portion of two years learning how to best measure physical fatigue at the neuromuscular level. I build sensitive analog electronic instruments, developed digital signal processing algorithms, and built computer-based medical instrumentation that measured muscle activity. I teased out new information on neuromuscular control, using brain imaging and external brain stimulators. All the while colleagues in our laboratories looked closely at muscular sclerosis, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, and brain functioning in both healthy and impaired populations.

We all knew that attention… the attention of the human subjects of our experiments, was the key to understanding almost everything. If only we could control attention, we could make good measurements. But attention remains at the will of the people.

Attention is at the center of fatigue. Every “ounce of attention” you give away takes energy from you. Energy you would have spent succeeding. Mental fatigue is a very real thing, with physical correlates.

I believe attention is the key to success in SEO. If you are an SEO building your own sites, all you need to do is pay close attention to the task at hand and you will succeed. There is so much opportunity for profit on the web that almost any endeavor will succeed if executed. The problem, is staying focused. EVERYONE wants your attention. EVERYONE is earning profits from YOUR attention.

Forums are attention-stealers. They can derail your efforts. SEO web sites are attention stealers. Pay too much attention to SEO and you will fail in your endeavor, not because SEO doesn’t work (duh) but because you didn’t get your job done. You got “distracted”. You missed the boat.

The news is an attention stealer. Your phone is an attention stealer. Your radio, iPod, and computer operating systems are attention whores. Advertisements are based on the concept of gaining (and holding) your attention. Web pages (landing pages) are attention tour guides. Promotions are attention con artists. You want a challenge? Analyze how a meditation home study vendor markets his wares on the Internet. Hey! Over HERE! Look! I can show YOU how to gain BACK control of your ATTENTION! There’s a job I’d enjoy, if for nothing else but the irony.

Build a community, a web-based service, a blog, or an affiliate sales site and you will succeed if you work hard and pay attention to only what matters, not allowing yourself to be distracted. That’s how the successful ones have done it, and that’s why they pitch their “how to make money fast” programs to YOU. Attention is the key. Attention is the currency. Keep yours, and gather everyone else’s. It really is that simple. Are you paying attention?

When I was a kid I rode the public bus home from school because of lacrosse practice. I rode the Manorhaven bus from Mineola to Flower Hill, where I transferred to the #23 Northern Boulevard bus. The #23 ran through some very prosperous neighborhoods in Nassau County, on it’s way into Queens, a mostly blue collar (at that time) borough of New York City. So I rode the #23 with the day workers, returning from cleaning homes and pools, ending their days on the bus ride at 7pm. But the Manorhaven bus was a connector through some of the poorer neighborhoods of central Nassau County. When I rode the Manorhaven bus, I rode with many un and under-employed thugs and scammers.

“Lemme see your watch“, he said to me as he sat down in front of me, turned the wrong way in the seat of the bus, arms extended almost into my lap space. His five teenaged friends had almost simultaneously moved over to my side of the bus as if following him, taking their places in the seat next to him, across from him, next to me, across the aisle from me, and (I sensed), behind me. “Gimme your watch“, he insisted.

“No“, I said. I was still uncertain of what was going down, but I was pretty sure that giving this guy my watch was not going to be wise. Nor, I doubted, would it be the end of the encounter. I was only 16, but I was no idiot, and this guy was not much older than me in years.

“Why not? Lemme see. I won’t take it“, he assured me with a smile. With his questioning his arms flayed about, as if he had learned gesturing from an Italian but didn’t understand that most of Long Island’s gesturing Italian role models did not have the limbs of NBA all stars. His arms were way too long, and too close to my face.

“Let me alone“, I said.

I looked past him to the front of the bus. The bus driver did not glance in the big rear view mirror. I waited. He didn’t glance. That’s odd, I thought. He’s always glancing back here…shooting his attention briefly down the bus aisle, once every few seconds, as he drove the bus. Today he seemed stiffly forward-focused. I was all alone on a crowded bus. Me and my five new found, watch-deprived friends.

Where is your attention? Did you lend it to me for a minute, like I didn’t lend my watch to the teenaged intimidator on the Manorhaven bus?

I would never have seen my watch again had I “let him see it for a sec”. And your attention, which I may have just conned out of you by asking “let me have your attention for a minute” will never come back to you, either. It has been spent. Gone. Energy cannot be created nor destroyed, but it sure can change hands. Your mental energy just transferred to my traffic log to enhancing the “time on page” in my analytics report. Left behind in the space in your brain is (hopefully just a little) mental fatigue. A little “lactic acid” that now needs to be cleared.

Pay attention to your dream and stay focused on your task to sell your ebook or build back links or write articles or analyze SERPs or sell your wares. The rewards will come. Break’s over; back to work. Don’t get distracted. And as you build properties, focus on gaining the attention of the search engines. Craft your landing pages to focus attention on your call to action, your pitch, your price point, or your value position. Find the visitor that has attention to spend, and provide a means for the transfer of that attention away from them, and over to you. Then cash it in.

It really is that simple. Pay attention. get them to pay attention. It’s all about attention.

I haven’t participated in any WebmasterWorld things for a while. I tired of it, got annoyed by the mods and community, and pretty much saw no value to it. Now I am re-considering Pubcon because it is so mixed up now. So big, with so much going on and so many people all mixed up in it… maybe it will be good to go. Big enough to get lost in, and not have to deal with some of the less-desirable parts?

Are you going? Why? Why not? I wonder if anyone who reads this blog will be there. That might be interesting.

Update 10/14: I decided to go and booked the trip. I skipped Tuesday but will stay till Saturday morning. I hope I get to meet people there.

I wandered over here and saw this link to a Mac vs. PC video that reminds me of a few people I know (especially the Jack Russel Terrier part). But, in the end I dedicate this post to YOU. You know who you are, you former PC, former Mac, PC user.

So none of the SEOs out there are publishing real SEO tips anymore? Well, here’s a small one to keep in mind that can make you a wee bit more competitive while maintaining a decent level of decorum in the keyword spamming department. I call it “Search box suggestion keyword spam” and it is dripping with plausible deniability so Matt shouldn’t have any issue with it.

Got a search box on your site? Okay, chances are it’s top right or at least close to the top of the page. It has alt text, of course (right?). It has a little button logo or click spot, which is of course properly named with a keywordy label, and of course keywordy alt text, right?

Well, does it also have a line of “example” keywords to show your visitors how to use it? Is that example readable text? Is it keyword rich? Why not? For one example, click here.

Note to self: check the backlinks to www.johnon.com in a few days and see if anyone out there appreciates free SEO tips.

Let everyone else comment on the YouTube financials. I’ll stick with the fall out. If Google pays $1.6 Billion in stock for YouTube, it means at least one of three things:

Google thinks Google stock is WAY overvalued

Google thinks the YouTube people are gifted geniuses capable of achieving for more than Google’s 200 or so Ph.D.s, recruited through a series of intractable Sudoku puzzles placed on highway billboards.

Google understands that attention, as laid upon video, can be interrupted at any time for any reason and there is no way to prevent the imprinting of the message once so delivered.

Now I know that the Google executives don’t believe Google stock is overvalued. Otherwise, why would they buy so much of it themselves? I mean, looking at the insider sales of Google stock over the past year, you can clearly see how they value the Google stock. Take a look here. Look in the “transaction” column, and scan down until you see “acquisition” or “purchase”. Keep going. Down further. It’s a two year table, so just skip all the “sale” ones. All the way down. Keep looking. No, that “acquisition” was at $0… basically a freebie. Look for the ones where they actually invested in their own company.

Oops. There are none. It’s all sales. Not one purchase? Hmm….. but that table shows BILLIONS of dollars that Google executives have sold off in 2006 alone. Where are the purchases? Is not a single Google executive interested in buying Google stock? Wow.

Anyway, even if #1 is true, how about #2? Check out Chad and whatsisname on YouTube. These guys arepureobviously may be geniuses. After all, they just got $1.6 Billion of Google stock (the stock that everyone wants to own sell). With a restirction that it can’t be sold until all of the Google people have sold theirs first after some holding period. Hey, this is getting confusing. How about #3?

Ahhh, number 3. The death of YouTube. Let me ask you this. Everyone has seen some form of the “ghost” video, right? I don’t wish it upon any of you, so no link here, but if you haven’t seen it, it’s basically a video that seems innocuous and teases you into paying close attention, with an artificially low volume. Towards the end, they raise the volume suddenly and scare you with an in your face screaming ghoulish character. Hah. Hah. Hah. Welcome back to sophomore year in high school.

Now, the question. How do you ERASE that experience? Rewind it? Un-wind it? You can’t. Video is serial… what comes next doesn’t exist until it has already happened. Cognitively, it’s an unpreventable experience. Perrrrrfect. Welcome to GooTube, where advertisements pop into your visual cortex without warning, and context enlists your limbic system to help imprint the experience in surround sound.

The death of YouTube, ferr sherr as it loses the audience that recently adopted it in exchange for a TV audience seeking a more pervasive, personalized TV experience. “Dood that really hurt. Hit me again eh huh“. The Johnny and Bam culture. The old MTV’ers.

And of course now we have tons for the 200+ Ph.D.’s to do with their brain cells. With all the javascript I never understood how Google recruited real Ph.D.s, but assumed they just got the ones seeking monetary fortunes. Now, I fear they will get the bottom feeding neurocognitive brain trust away from the Universities. How to make friends and influence people, subliminally. That sounds like interesting work. And the “don’t be evil” part was rationalized away in that field decades ago.

I turned off TV 3 years ago. How long before I have to turn off the Internet as well?

This blog is about online marketing and SEO. It’s my opinions and that’s all. I marvel every day at the wackiness of the online world, but try and limit my blogging to SEO and online marketing. God knows I could go on and on otherwise.

I have spent a good deal of time in the past year reading SEO websites and blogs. Many years ago I got involved in SEO from a performance position. That was all about traffic. Then I got into it from a search engine rankings perspective.

That was all about targeted traffic. A few years ago I got into it from a content perspective. That was partly an extension of the search engine ranking aspect of SEO, and partly a commitment to quality for purposes of real estate development, branding, and community development. Nowadays it’s everything combined, plus some. Yet all I see are old-fashioned web sites and blogs in the SEO / search marketing world. Why is that?

One of the big SEO secrets is that many so-called “SEO” people are clinging to perseverance. They have properties from 199X, and are using those to generate the search engine “good will” they need for today’s web sites. They cling to those past properties like a child clings to mommy’s leg on the first day of pre school. They seem afraid to make changes or update their sites, even when it gets embarassing, for fear of losing the search rankings. Don’t rock the boat, because this boat may not be rightable. Is that SEO? Nah. But it does seem to be driving some of the web SEO efforts out there.

A recurring theme on SEO web sites is “why SEO for clients if you can just SEO for your own sites and make the same money, without the hassles?” It’s a decent question. But after looking at yet another hand-coded html website with photos from a conference, I have to accept that some of these people are really afraid of change. Flickr? Gallery? Lighbox? Photobucket? The seven others I won’t mention for competitive reasons? The advances in the presentation of images on the web have been incredible in the past 5 years. Can’t you work with them on an SEO basis yet?

I know, why give content to Flickr when you can hoard it for yourself. But really? At some point that selfishness comes back to bite you. Flickr and the other image serving databases really do add value these days. It’s not just about displaying images. It’s slideshows, commentary, navigation, and visual appeal. I was unwilling to spend even 5 minutes inside this one, because the navigation didn’t help me at all and I was not interested enough to invest my own efforts in browsing the images. That’s a fundamental of ecommerce, isn’t it? Adding sufficient value such that the user acts when otherwise they are not so inclined?

Yes, that section is labeled “raw photos” but heh, isn’t that further testiment to the fact that this is ancillary content and exactly what would benefit the most from something like Flickr? Flickr auto processes raw photos to thumbnails and presentation-quality images, doesn’t it?

Call me unique as an old hand at SEO if you like, but the fact is I used to go to those conferences and was looking to the images in consideration of going again in November. Instead, I’m writing this blog post. What do you think… was I encouraged to register by that website?

The particulars are really not the point. I’m sure there are excuses arguments for why that particular page is the way it is. But that is just an example…of which there are too many. The SEO world has crumbled in my opinion, and is in a new, temporary insanity phase. Danny Sullivan at pubCon with people like Eric Ward and ShoeMoney. The paparazzi in me says “go! this will be a spectacle!” but without a press pass and camera mask I doubt it will be more fun that drudgery. I also doubt it will be innovative while trying to appeal to the Colgate-Palmolives of the world.

Why do SEO’s work for clients? Perhaps it’s because a client brings me a Flash site with embedded galleries that are beautiful and elegant and truly fun to navigate, yet the site has no search engine presence. No, I won’t tell them to build an HTML version of the site for “accessibility” so I can SEO that. I will SEO their beautiful site. Yes, it’s harder. But that’s what they pay me for. And guess what? It gets me wet, where otherwise I may have grown old, afraid to rock the boat for fear of getting wet.

If you are an SEO ask yourself, when is the last time you paid for training for yourself? If it was more than a year ago, I suspect you have a problem.

This summer I watched my ten year old son sail out from the dock in his Opti, tacking and jibing his way out through the harbor to the open bay. He had to get to the race Committee boat a mile out, in order to enter the race. As his former sailing instructor told me when I questioned the wisdom of sending a ten year old out to sea alone, “if he can’t sail out to the race, he’s not exactly fit for racing, is he?” I let him go. It was hard to do. It was awesome to watch. I will never forget it. Neither will he. Did I mention he took first place in his boat class?

And as my son reminded me later, the first thing they taught him in sailing class was how to right the boat when it capsized. On day one they took the young wannabe sailors out into the harbor and capsized them, again and again. By day two they were old salts at righting Optis. And the game they played at lunch time all season long? Pirates… where one kid, at the secret command of his Captain, would dive overboard and quickly “surprise attack” his “enemy” by capsizing his boat, righting it for himself, and sailing it away. Sounds too much like the way SEO should be, if you ask me.

I compete in many different markets on the web, and many of those are less-than serious. Much of the Internet is like real estate – you take a domain name and either develop it or hold it. I liken the non-serious web sites that I have on valuable domain names to what are called “tax payers” in the real estate market. A “tax payer” is a business or building that is put up to cover the property taxes associated with the property while you hold on to it for investment value. You don’t care to make it a big successful enterprise, but you need it to at least cover proerty taxes which tend to rise as a property’s value increases. Common “tax payers” are inexpensive strip malls, Self-Storage facilities, and pay parking lots. (For the record, I am not in the “parked domain” business).

I use my “tax payers” as tests of various SEO methods as well. Often that involves writing, because let’s face it Google has been quite the consumer of pop literature / pulpless fiction these past few years. Oddly, I find myself competiting is some Asian-oriented markets, where not surprisingly English is a second language. That means I find myself competitng for the top spots in markets where my primary competitors are non-English speaking, Asian webmasters.

I get to see the worst of the SEO world on these sites. I check them every few days for the entertainment value. SPAM taken to new heights. Image spam, then keyword spam, then both, combined. Link spam, more link spam, and then 20 or 30 pages of 302 redirects to my site (WTF?). One day I found 5 web pages full of live links to my site’s pages, all direct and with good anchor text. What was that, exactly? Thanks for the link love.

Often the methods are good ones, and they work for a day or two before the competing page disappears. I saw an image last week sliced into 40 pieces, each with prime alt and title attributes. Shot right to #1. For a day. I see plenty of pictures of pretty women on industrial products pages, just like those calendars Dad brought home from the construction sites back in the seventies. I see my own images hotlinked, which of course I play with to further the entertainment. At one point it got so funny I created an “about dot com” page to talk about it, and took the second spot away with that. It has to hurt, no?

Today I placed a large half-page banner ad on one of my site’s home page, saying “Thanks for playing. Try again sometime. And if you need a real SEO, call me” with a URL for my contact page. Why not? If they are working so hard to be #1 and I am the only thing in the way, I can make it easier. I really can.

The reality is not that content is king, per se, but that the knobs are tuned way high for semantics right now. If you don’t have a strong *American* English content tweaker involved in your site, you will not rank in a competitive SERP or in almost any local SERP, except perhaps by chance.

Another inquiry, another proposal, another SEO client. And in between those three lies 15 hours of studying the search engine results pages (SERPs).

SEO is one large part of the competitive Internet, but not all of it. The SEO toolset, however, supports most of what we do when we get competitive. SEO tools are not just for SEO. They are for searching, gathering competitive intelligence, teaching and training. SEO’s drive the development of tools. They provide the knowledge base for understanding what the tools do. What they show. How they can be interpreted. We owe a lot to a small handful of really good SEOs for the tools we use every day.
But I think the number one activity of competitive development is studying the SERPs. Sadly, that is also one area where many clients have spent very little time. They spend more time in analytics reports than in the SERPs. Why? Because Analytics companies are marketers. They make their reports look like meaningful data. Did you ever spend an hour clicking around inside of Webtrends Enterprise? What a waste of time, yet we all do it on occasion. Why? There’s an excellent SEO lesson in there…one that Markus Frind would be all to happy to tell you.

SERPs look like what they are : results sets. Clients feel inept at search. And why not? They can’t find anything, so naturally they will feel they are not expert searchers. But the real issue is what you get, not what you wanted to get when you entered a query. Because what you get is what everyone else gets, too. That’s reality.

Is that clear? Go ahead and search for your company name. What comes up? I don’t care if you don’t come up, or you come up third, or whatever. I care about what comes up first. Who is it? Why did they come up first? That is where the gold lies. And I spend my time looking at that, not your web pages. And so should you. Only after you understand the market can you compete.

I do recognize that many people don’t know what to look for in the SERPs, or how to examine them. Recognition of that means progress. Should I help with that? You tell me.

I am thinking it might be good for me to present here, in this blog, specific steps for understanding the SERPs. Simple yet effective ways to look closely at what matters when you run a query against Google or Yahoo!. Basic but important stuff that should be checked each and every time, for specific clues. What do you think? Let me know if that is a good idea and I will consider it. I have plenty to say on the topic.

My friend Stefan sent me a link to Steve Yegge’s blog. Everything that follows should be prefaced with “apparently” because honestly, that’s all I read. I don’t know Steve or anything about him.

Steve is apparently a Google manager. One of those privileged elites that are “in charge” of developers that bring us such great Beta applications as Google search, Froogle, Calendar, and Local. Steve is also apparently a writer. He writes engagingly, with cynicism and humor interlaced with opinion. Good blog content when the mojo is flowing. Boring, wordy, wandering drivel when not. I know what that’s like. I read all mosta good portion some of what he wrote, and enjoyed part of that. Stefan was right. He’s got perspective, based on experience, has paid attention and likes to write.

But what strikes me most about Steve’s piece on Agile Software Development is how much Google Kool-Aid Steve has been drinking. It’s running from the corners of his blogger mouth. He’s sloshing around so much in the Kool Aide he’s stained the carpet beneath his blog. The cleaning lady has already filed a formal complaint, because such stains are not “daily housecleaning”, and her building Supervisor has already submited a proposal for an extra-cost cleansing with the “expensive stuff” and 3 union workers. It’s not a pretty sight.

Steve initially writes about Agile Software Development. A good handful of paragraphs laced with tongue-in-cheek cynicism backed by an obvious first-hand experience with the method. That was fun. I think that’s why Stefan sent it to me. Stefan and I used to go back and forth on PHP code, playing with the concept of “more eyes on code”. It was great a nightmare. We both enjoyed it, much like he enjoys getting paid to be fopped over the head with a mostly-foam pretend sword in the middle of the dark woods, and I enjoy walking from downtown Vancouver to South Richmond on a rainy day. But I doubt we would do much of it, because it’s really a P.I.T.A. There are better ways to witness someone getting whacked with mostly-not-splintered-and-exposed play wood swords, and the bus is really a better way to cross from Granville to Richmond. There’s not much to see for almost 3 miles around the airport with no sidewalk. Good stuff to know, though.

Anyway Steve moves from Agile software development to project management, where he serves himslef the first round of bright red, frosty-cold Google Kool Aide from that bulbous glass pitcher…chink chink goes the perfectly-clear ice cube as it plops into the brand-new glass you would never actually let a little kid handle. Just like the commercial. It seems Google doesn’t really practice much in the Project Management department. First, Steve admits that

Google’s process probably does look like chaos to someone from a more traditional software development company.

and then he enlightens us about how it really works at Google:

there are managers, sort of, but most of them code at least half-time, making them more like tech leads.

With 20% time spent on “other things”, that means that at most one half of 80% or 40% of time is spent managing, and at least 40% of time is spent coding. So Google’s managers spend at most 40% of their time “managing”. Got it.

developers can switch teams and/or projects any time they want, no questions asked; just say the word and the movers will show up the next day to put you in your new office with your new team.

Huh? Wow. Is that true? I have to guess Google has one helluvalot of “managers” if they only spend 40% of their time “managing” and the company allows free flow of human resources at the employee’s will. Bejeesus, Steve, is that really how it “works” over there? Man, I’d keep changing projects until I got the office with the view. Find yourself sitting too close to Milton? Switch projects!

Google has a philosophy of not ever telling developers what to work on, and they take it pretty seriously.

Awesome (for coders). Wow. I want to work at Google, too (but not as a manager, thanks).

there aren’t very many meetings. I’d say an average developer attends perhaps 3 meetings a week, including their 1:1 with their lead.

Hmm.. am I starting to understand why “managers” are spending 40% of their time programming? USUALLY that’s not the best way to get world-class programming done, but maybe things are different at Google. Actually, Steve, what is there to meet about?

it’s quiet. Engineers are quietly focused on their work, as individuals or sometimes in little groups or 2 to 5.

Ha ha, Steve. I’d keep real quiet, too if I had it so good. Little coffee klotches groups of 2 to 5 make for the BEST kind of chat, I agree. Especially after a few rounds of IM and escalating email battles… there’s no gossip like the face-to-face kind. Dude, what an awesome environment!

there aren’t Gantt charts or date-task-owner spreadsheets or any other visible project-management artifacts in evidence, not that I’ve ever seen.

Um… maybe that’s because no one is making them, Steve? Who has time anyway? And it sounds like no one is asking for them either, so good call not making them. I remember the old days when we didn’t have those, either. And then some uppity B school guy came in and changed everything. What a raw deal. That was, like, 1980 or something.

even during the relatively rare crunch periods, people still go get lunch and dinner, which are (famously) always free and tasty, and they don’t work insane hours unless they want to.

Um, again, Steve, I think you’ve maybe missed a perception or two. That time when they feel busy, and chat about how busy they are, and curse the “deadline” but still have time to go to free-and-tasy lunch and free-and-tasty dinner? That’s not “crunch time”, Steve. That’s just a little obligation getting in the way of creativity. Some might call it “pooh pooh” time, as in the “oh dear I broke a nail” flusterment a Valley Girl might experience while in a hurry to get her hair done… NOW she has to pause to get a manicure and she-will-be-late for her hair appointment.

I have to confess that Steve goes on and on and on and on and on and on beyond this point and I didn’t read it all, and I did detect a TON of comments posted up there on his blog, so maybe he had a lot more good stuff to say about how Google managed to release beta application after beta application on time and under budget consistently and with aplomb. I just didn’t see it.

What I saw was a promotional advertisement for working at Google, disgusted disguised as a blog article on Agile Software Development. Google and Agile Software development. Google – Agile – Google – Agile – Google is more Agile than Agile itself. That’s what I read. Wow. Not only is Google all over the state of the Art (Google and Agile Development) but Google is way beyond mere Agile, and is truly agile!

From my proletarian perch in the valleys of the Google wasteland Internet, those software “engineers” haven’t finished too many projects. Lots of javascript, though. Is that what managers code? That would explain a lot. There was some Python stuff. And a bunch of acquisitions that ruined enhanced Google local.

Yawn. I thought I would enjoy this post because I did enjoy Steve’s first few paragraphs on Agile development, but it’s gotten old very fast so I’m gonna close it up. I have another $500/day PPC campaign to trim down and optimize so the client doesn’t continue to pay Google for broad matches on parked pages and web ring hobby sites (if I can even stop that). And then there’s that supplemental site that needs to be re-worked so it actually shows up when people Google the company’s name. Stuff like that. Obligations. Such a bore.